Red Digital Magazines

(4.6)   RED Camera Manual User Help Guide  >  RED One Theory of Operation  >  Red Digital Magazines

If the codec is the blood of the camera, the digital magazines are the heart.  All your information is pumped to and from these magazines.  There are a variety of different magazines that can be used:

RED-FLASH

At the time of this writing, the 32GB cards are still unavailable, but coming soon.  There are 8GB and 16GB cards available.  Flash cards are great if they meet the needs of your project because they don't have any moving parts, so they are more resistant to shock and fast movement than hard drives.  The 8GB and 16GB cards are not as fast as a hard drive, however.  The 32GB cards may increase the capability of the cards to compare with a drive.

RED-DRIVE

These are actually 2 small laptop drives in a single enclosure.  The two drives inside are raided together to produce greater speed.  We will not get into a thorough discussion of raids, but some explanation is worth while.  

RAIDS

First of all, the word RAID can be used as a noun and a verb.  Raiding a drive is done either with hardware or software and it simply means combining multiple drives into a single drive.  You can combine more than just two drives, and in fact some of the newer flavors of raid require at least 3 or 5 unique hard drives.  There are 2 basic types of raid, and these have been combined to create more. 

The most basic is Raid 0 - which is also known as striped drives.  After you raid the drives, any data to or from the drives is split by the raid across all the drives.  So if you have two drives that are striped, each drive gets half the info - which means the whole equation is 2x as fast.  The disadvantage to raid 0 is that if either drive goes bad, you lose the information on both drives.

The second type is Raid 1 - which is also known as mirroring drives.  After you mirror drives, all the information written to one drive will be mirrored on the second.  This slows down the system, so its not used for capturing media.  It might, however be a viable solution for on-set storage.  If your budget precludes you from one of the newer raid types (specifically raid 5) then raid 1 is a very safe and semi-cost effective way of backing up your data automatically.  Of course if the whole enclosure is lost, damaged or stolen then the mirror will not help, so just mirroring the drives is NOT a complete backup solution.

Skipping over some of the other flavors, and leaving off some of the newest - the most popular raid today is probably the raid 5.  Raid 5 works with a minimum of 3 drives.  It first stripes the first two drives to increase the speed, then it writes "parity data" to the third drive.  This parity data is not a complete backup of your files, but it is enough to rebuild a file if it gets corrupted.  So the advantage of raid 5 is that if either of the data drives goes bad, you can rebuild from the parity data and you get most of the speed bump from the raid 0.  The disadvantage is that you need another hard drive in the equation.

So to summarize: the RED drives use a Raid 0 of two drives to achieve the required speed for the magazines.

Remember that you can attach a red drive directly to your computer via Fire Wire or USB-2.  This can be very handy in some instances, but it is certainly not the preferred method or workflow for extended access, like an editing room.  You should definitely copy the data from the red-drive as soon as possible.  Not only will you ikely need the red-drive again, but remember that it is onlt a raid 0 so it is not that safe for repeated and long term access.  Reformatting the drives while on set offsets this danger.

The next page will cover the file structure and naming conventions of the data stored on the drives.